Fannish Pareidolia: Criticism through Creative Composition (Thesis)
Dorothy Stachowiak, Spring 2015
Director: Lucille McCarthy
Committee Members: Steph Ceraso and Craig Saper
This thesis examines publicly accessible, deliberately composed creative fanworks. While many have explored fanfiction as behavior, Stachowiak looks at it as text: actively composed works, which engage with the gaps present in existing canonical narratives in order to express their interpretation and/or criticism. Methods of literary and discourse analysis are used to show the various ways in which fanworks operate as rhetoric and literature.